Re: GNAT GPL Edition Maintenance and Upgrades

["Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Alex R. Mosteo a écrit :
[interesting stuff deleted]

> In short, if I were Ludovic and were faced with a maintenance task, I'd
> leave 3.15p as it is, as the Ada95 choice; the GPL version as
> experimental 0Y with full toolkits, and would aim to replace it in the
> future with the GMGPL gcc one when it starts to settle and the 0Y
> feature set is complete.

I'm actually planning to do something close to that.  Debian Sarge
is the current stable version, and its default Ada compiler is gnat
3.15p. Sarge will remain the current stable version until around
December 2006, when Etch is released (the date is tentative: as always,
Etch will be released "when it is ready").

I think we will probably end up with GCC 4.1 as the default Ada
compiler in Etch.  GCC 4.1 may not be perfect WRT Ada 2006, but it will
support Ada 95 on more hardware platforms than does GNAT 3.15p; this is
a big plus.  Also, GCC 4.1 is likely to become the default compiler
for C and C++ as well, meaning that it will receive good support
on many targets.

I suppose (but this is outside of my control) that GCC 4.1 will first
appear in the "experimental" distribution of Debian, which is just
designed for such purposes.  For those who don't know how Debian works,
"experimental" contains a small number of packages that must be
installed on top of Sid (unstable).  Packages do not migrate from
experimental to Sid automatically, but only at their maintainer's
explicit request.

Currently, I'm waiting to see how things turn out upstream (i.e. on
gcc.gnu.org).  I also scan the gcc and gcc-patches lists for Ada-
related things.  I will announce the beginning of the transition on
this forum.

As I have said before, I don't have enough manpower to handle both
GNAT GPL and GCC; it is one or the other.  The vote that took place
earlier means that I will go for GCC and ignore GNAT GPL completely.
Unless, of course, there is a landslide of votes in the opposite
direction, but this seems unlikely.  (I've counted your vote and
Marc's).

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.